A Muslim girl
has been murdered, and the Left, which claims to care about women and their
oppression, is silent.

Aqsa Parvez, a
sixteen-year-old Muslim girl living in Canada, was, according to police,
strangled to death by her father because she refused to wear the hijab.
Muhammad Parvez, Aqsa’s father, has been charged with murder, and her brother,
Waqas Parvez, with obstructing police. A friend of Aqsa explained: “She wanted to live
her life the way she wanted to, not the way her parents wanted her to. She just
wanted to be herself, honestly she just wanted to show her beauty, and not be
pushed around by her parents telling her what she has to be like, what she has
to do. Nobody would want to do that.”

One might have
assumed that the Left would be leading the charge against a culture that
victimizes those who want to live their lives the way they want to, but that
has not been the case. Leftist publications had little to say about her death.
Feminist writer Katha Pollitt, as of this writing, still hasn’t written a word about it. Nor has anyone
else at The Nation. CounterPunch? Not a word. The National Organization
for Women? Nothing. Even Human Rights Watch has shown no interest in the case
of Aqsa Parvez.

By contrast, on
December 14, Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine published an article about the
incident called “Horror Under the Hijab,” by Stephen Brown. Then
followed my article, “Canadian DisHonor Murder,” on December 19. Of
course, Katha Pollitt and others on the Left would take issue with both of those
articles, since Brown wrote about an “unbelievable attempt to detract people’s
attention from the real issue of Muslim intolerance, even hatred, towards
females’ desire for freedom,” and I suggested that “an examination of some
elements of Islamic theology and culture was necessary in order to try to
prevent more young Muslim girls from being similarly victimized in the future.”

The Daily Kos
was not moved. It devoted one of its twoposts on the killing of Aqsa Parvez to asking,
“Why, why, WHY is it that whenever someone who is Muslim, or has a
Muslim-sounding name, does something... it’s automatically blamed on Islam?” Of
course, the answer to this is that Muslims who commit acts of violence so often
explain those actions by reference to Islam, but that possibility isn’t part of
the Left’s worldview. It is noteworthy also that the Daily Kos has not hesitated to blame Christianity for
the decline of public education, for instance, or to claim on the basis of the actions of a few
individuals that “Apocalyptic Premillennial Dispensationalist Christianity is
the de-facto state endorsed religion in the US armed forces.” Only when it
comes to Islam are such large conclusions, no matter how well supported by the
evidence, never acceptable.

Rather than
making the hijab murder a cause celebre the way it did, for instance, with the
Matthew Shepherd murder, the Left has, moreover, attacked Horowitz and
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week for raising concerns about Muslim women in the
first place. “The Islamofascist Awareness people aren’t interested in what’s
actually going on in the Muslim world. They just use the woman question as an
easy way to target Muslims.” So said Columbia University anthropologist Lila
Abu-Lughod over the phone to Pollitt, who highlighted the quote in an
attack on Horowitz in The Nation. Pollitt airily dismissed the
central charge of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week organizers--that the academic Left
was ignoring the plight of women in the Muslim world—with a flick of the wrist:
“And how likely is it that women’s studies professors think female genital
mutilation is great and honor killing is ‘just their culture’?” Abu-Lughod also
told her that Columbia’s women’s studies department was offering three courses
on women in the Islamic world, “none of which paints a rosy picture.”

But if this is
the case, why is every Islamic crime of violence against Muslim women--and the
Parvez case is just the most recent in a long line—met with silence? Why hasn’t
Katha Pollit been using her bully pulpit to make this murder a major story?
Because she is more interested in protecting “the Muslim world” than its
victims.

The silence
extends also to Noorjehan Barmania, who took up Pollitt’s criticism of Horowitz
in The Guardian.“It was Katha Pollitt,” she declared, “who made me see it….She speculated
that by focusing on the oppression of women, Horowitz had found an easy way to
target the Muslim world.” Well, then, why doesn’t Barmania offer an alternative
from the Left? Why doesn’t she outdo Horowitz in championing the rights of
women in the Islamic world? Why doesn’t she demand justice in the Aqsa Parvez
case and eloquently, more eloquently than David Horowitz, decry this barbaric
murder? Because to do so would be to break ranks with the Left’s vision of an
America that is inauthentic in everything except its Islamophobia. Barmania and
Pollitt seem impervious to the irony: although they attack Horowitz for
allegedly being a faux feminist, his FrontPage magazine is one of the few
places that is actually standing up for this poor girl, and calling for an end
to the conditions that led to her murder in the first place.

Pollitt
concluded her attack on Horowitz in The Nation by recounting Ayaan Hirsi
Ali’s “rightward trajectory,” and suggesting: “Maybe we leftists and feminists
need to think a bit more self-critically about how the AEI -- to say nothing of
the clownish Horowitz -- managed to win over this bold and complex crusader for
women’s rights.” This is a calumny against Hirsi Ali, who accomplished more in
one book, Infidel, than Katha Pollit has in an entire career, and who is
forced to move through her public life with five bodyguards because of the
cowardly ambivalence of people like Pollit who see her merely as a prize won by
the vast right wing conspiracy. If such people will not unambiguously defend
Aayan Hirsi Ali, perhaps the most knowledgeable and outspoken critic of
violence against Muslim women in the world, it is little wonder that they won’t
defend a 16 year old girl in Canada whose life was taken by that violence.